Where is VR now, where is it going in the next 5 years, and in the next 25? Are you using it? What for?

VR, especially home VR via HMD’s has had a resurgance in the past 5-10 years, from being used for gaming with popular games like Beat Saber and Half Life: Alyx to being able to actually do normal computer work in immersive VR rooms placed anywhere you can imagine to using AR where virtual things are overlaid on reality via a display.

I tend to work with education, so my guesses on where this is going will focus a lot on that, but I absolutely see my workplace getting VR in the next 5 years, and in the next 25 I entirely expect them to actually perform full lessons and classes within them, perhaps even remotely (instead of using Zoom or so) as an optional thing. My work is a fairly small place but they tend to like the newer tech so we do like to experiment with such things.

How is VR for anyone who has an HMD at home or work? What do you use it for? Which do you have and how is it? What HMD do you suggest and why?

My wife tried out VR with a friend’s set recently and she is now absolutely dead set on getting a set, she’s thinking the Valve Index as we both have room for full roomscale and it’s high enough quality to help minimize nausea issues for her. She tried the Oculus Quest but the screendoor effect on it was making her very nauseous in a few games she tried, plus it kept losing tracking of the controllers when they went out of view of the HMD. Plus we use linux at home on all our computers and the Valve Index seems to have great support there (excepting some bluetooth firmware update issues that are easy enough to work around until its properly fixed), unlike the Oculus’s.

Honestly I’ve been wanting a set for a long time, not necessarily to play games in it (most kinds of games I play wouldn’t really translate well to VR), but I’d love to just kind of work in it. This is even more enticing for me nowadays since working from home more often and it would be very nice to split my work into one world from the home world to make it easier to get in the working mindset.

And of course, I’m very curious to programming for it, especially more standard programs that can work in it in interesting ways, full 3D desktops, like via xrdesktop. Is anyone else programming for VR? Not necessarily just for games but doing anything else that is more work or general-use related?

Perhaps we need a ‘hardware’ programming category, lol. ^.^